Firefox desktop market share now below 9%
netmarketshare.com
netmarketshare.com
I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome.
I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.
I'd rather not have a world where only chrome and chrome clones exist - and I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I hear)
> I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I hear)
I need an app like Fox Clocks, which worked in FF only for a long time, but now is available on Chrome too.
Those screaming for privacy, like myself, are in fact a small minority.
Also regardless of the topic, double standards are rampant in this community.
You’ll often see people screaming against Google but still using @gmail.com because paying for a domain and the price of one coffee per month is too expensive. Or people claiming that they need ad-blockers for privacy, but then screaming against paywalls.
That's some expensive coffee.
Google's G Suite, which is still better than free web mail since you no longer have the lock-in, plus a better privacy policy, is $5 per month, which is almost the price of a Starbucks Venti Latte. And this is actually an expensive offering in the business.
So no, it's not an expensive coffee, especially since we are talking about a highly skilled and highly paid demographic.
Also I'm from Romania where we have a lower cost of living and lower wages to go with it, so seeing my Silicon Valley brethren complaining about the price of paying for non-free email on your own domain is really awkward, given the importance of email.
I get it, I hate subscriptions for software too. But not when that service is essential for your profession, your security or your privacy and email is all of the above.
A cup of coffee is a pretty lousy indication of cost. For some people going into a Starbucks for a $5/€4,40/£3,92 gluten-free-unicorn-sprinkles-ariana-grande-latte may be part of a daily routine, but for others, coffee means using a coffee-maker to brew your own cup for a few cents, or just getting a cup to go at a some kiosk.
And your email address is your online identity and has plenty of information in it that shouldn't leak, including your entire online purchasing history at least.
I am against paying for crap via subscriptions, I hate the subscriptions trend myself, but email in my opinion is fundamental to who we are and what we do online.
I almost never buy coffee out anywhere like Starbucks, but it was easy for me to understand in the context of his post
I use Tiger Technologies (https://tigertech.net) for hosting mine and my wife's personal sites and email, they are all I need for basic Wordpress/email hosting and they have a superb support team. If I decide I want to get my hands dirty with running a server, I use Vultr.
Also the much better deal is the business edition, at $10 per month, which also gives you unlimited GDrive storage. Couple that with something like ArqBackup, Rclone, etc and it gets to be very cost effective, being cheaper than a Dropbox subscription.
Also the Terms of Service for G Suite is meant for businesses and thus much better.
Just be careful when buying apps and books from Google Play. If you don't want to be locked-in, don't purchase anything that can't be migrated.
https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync
After cloning the repository and installing the listed dependencies (some Perl packages available in your Brew / Ubuntu repository already), you can do:
imapsync \
--host1 imap.old.com \
--user1 "old@email.com" \
--password1 xxxxxxxxxxxxx \
--ssl1 \
--host2 imap.new.com \
--user2 "new@email.com" \
--password2 yyyyyyyyyyyyy \
--ssl2 \
--errorsmax 1000000 \
--syncinternaldates \
--useheader 'Message-Id' \
--noreleasecheck \
--noexpunge \
--automap
But with FastMail, for those interested, the out of the box importing tools in their web interface work great, so no need for any command line tools.
It's a hugely flexible and versatile tool and it's quite zippy as well, can highly recommend.
Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data, to privacy oriented choices felt empowering.
I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant.
It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv.
I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).
On my phone I try to use OsmAnd on iOS, based on Open Street Map, see: https://osmand.net/ — my experience with this is mixed, where I live (in Bucharest Romania) it definitely has more info than GMaps on points of interest, however it's not as reliable for car navigation or public transit, so it's not as reliable for getting directions.
If you keep using Google Maps (I still do), at least disable the location tracking in your Google Account.
There is no alternative (that I was able to find) for the "browsing what's nearby" feature of maps. It allows you to pull up the app and just look around from where you are to find stores, restaurants, museums and whatnot. You can check opening times, reviews, see pictures, all from inside maps.
But, if you are looking for a GPS navigator alternative, there are plenty, and some are much better than maps, IMO. I personally use Sygic on Android, in the free version, and I've found it more accurate than maps in many occasions. It doesn't have the live updates on traffic like maps, but it will take you from point A to point B with a few metres accuracy. While maps sometimes just gets you to the other side of a building, and leaves it to you to figure out that the actual entrance is on the other side, and to reach it you have to drive around half a block, be careful with access restrictions, and go through a traffic light. Sygic just always gets me to the correct place, on the correct side of the buildings, and even signals parking areas nearby.
Locus/Locus Pro are good for looking at maps, it's nice having half the continent available offline. Depends a bit if OpenStreetMap works well in your area or not, and not much in the way of routing/POI as far as I know.
For public transport, there's transportr and Öffi and probably a bunch of specific ones for different regions - again, coverage depends on where you are.
I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.
Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well).
Edit: added 2nd paragraph
Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.
It's a sad world and we're a very geeky crowd.
Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.
It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite.
Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth.
Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense.
Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address.
I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.
Sorry but I think this is FUD and it potentially discouraged people from taking steps to be part of the solution and not the problem.
I’ve run my own mail server for years on a $5/mo Linode VPS, and am not passionate about email servers. It was a little difficult to set up but no more difficult than a lot of weekend projects the smart people on this site undertake. It should not be scary. You can also make the switch gradually by first setting up your MX and forwarding to gmail if you want to take it slow. There’s no reason anyone with a moderate amount of Linux skills and patience can’t host their own Email.
I don't want other people to read them but I'm resigned to the fact that they are.
In that context I'm not all that concerned about Google scanning my email to serve me ads that I'm blocking anyway.
For example your entire online purchasing history is in your email. That is not information that should be public ;-)
Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.
For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.
The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.
I had a Gmail in the month it was launched and I switched to my own domain (ironically, still in GSuite) in a process that took a few years. Whenever I login into a site with my old email, I would update it to the new one. My current email still connect to my old Gmail over POP3, but it’s mostly empty.
This reminds me to actually check how many emails I received over the past year that came via gmail. Off the top of my head I can only recall a single one, at least from a person I know and wanted to receive email from. I swiftly replied with my new address of course.
I'm going to stop forwarding now, and set up an auto-reply to give people a new address. Not my personal one, but an alias I'll set up in a minute, so that I can shut that down eventually too. Probably useless paranoia, but it floats my boat.
I don't regret the move one bit, and the whole process of setting up my account and moving all ten or so years worth of email from gmail to Fastmail was over and done within a week. Fastmail does what it says on the tin – it's very fast. It also pretty much never fails. In the past two or so years that I've had my account I have only experienced downtime once, for a few minutes. I made myself some coffee and then service was back again.
I am not affiliated with Fastmail in any way, shape or form – just a very happy customer.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me.
This is why even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC.
Google's standard ToC says that their service:
1. may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users
2. may collect your device fingerprint
3. can use your content for all their existing and future services
4. can share your personal information with other parties
5. may stop providing services to you at any time, for any reason
6. keeps the rights on your content when you stop using it
And as we've seen, Google indeed does all of the above.
The second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail and the cost of switching is higher, as can be seen by the people complaining about it. But that's a situation of making your bed and then sleeping in it.
And in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. It's the new IExplorer and the fact that it has an open source core doesn't matter that much when speaking of Google's lock-in on the market, because the Google-free forks are completely irrelevant.
I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC. It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC. I guarantee you that Fastmail has this clause.[0]
> second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail
That's irrelevant and a false equivalency. You can use Gmail with your own domain.
> in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want.
Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bin...
At which point they tell you that they have changed their ToCs
> It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC.
Which is why you check the ToCs to ensure that main classes of poor behaviour that you want to avoid are included in there.
And after a malicious ToC change, the company can immediately act on the policy, meaning if you're even a few minutes late to the party, or if it takes more than a few minutes to completely scrub your data from the website (it does) then your data is now subject to the new ToC.
So the ToC offers no legal protection from data abuse. It's just a nice thought.
It may be possible in the US, but especially if it's not in the interest of the consumer and if there is a service fee involved, then you need to be notified about such changes in the EU and an online publication won't do. Service providers in my country send me SMS messages and postmail with pickup confirmation required. If they don't have proof that I received that notification, then the new contract does not apply, by law.
Also these contracts can't be applied retroactively. So your point is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
>> "It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC"
Indeed, but the law does. Especially in the EU companies cannot use personally identifiable information without explicit consent. And now with the GDPR, they can't track or profile users without explicit consent either.
We'll see what will happen in the following years, but guess what, Google and Facebook are still doing the same shit, without asking for consent, because they consider that a sign-up is enough, since you've read and agreed to their terms and conditions ;-)
>> "You can use Gmail with your own domain."
I already said in my previous message, along with other messages here, that "even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC" and I don't like repeating myself.
Please make an effort to read, or we're going to simply talk past each other.
>> "Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked."
You mean the one where you asked about jumping from a frying pan and into the fire? I assumed it wasn't a question related to cooking.
Also, people (including me) think that some newsletters, some bills and receipts are not very personal, so people don't care.
I have two main addresses, one is from a local provider and my all financial e-mails and other stuff is coming to that e-mail address, however they don't encrypt anything.
I also just got a free Proton mail, and will upgrade the account when I'm a little better off. Paid e-mail addresses are not meaningless, but they're harder to justify in most people's eyes.
BTW, I never store anything which makes me uncomfortable, anywhere incl. my brain. That's a much better way of living. Not that privacy conscious people is hiding something, but that's my policy.
My point was that people aren’t willing to vote with their wallet, but being a loud mouth doesn’t cost anything.
And that’s how we end up with monopolies.
On the topic at hand I still remember the people crying against Firefox’s Pocket integration. Well, as Chrome crushes its competition, while becoming more invasive everyday, I hope they are happy with the outcome.
I think there's a confusion, by GMail, I've pointed to the free offering, not the GSuite, sorry for being not clear.
> My point was that people aren’t willing to vote with their wallet, but being a loud mouth doesn’t cost anything.
Because I think that the same people believe that their e-mail is not that private, so they don't feel the need for voting with their wallets, however they are loudmouths because they're bothered by the breaches or privacy invasions they read/hear. They feel they are either exempt from this or not affected as much, so they're not alarmed.
taint.net seems to be for sale.
It's not just paid email addresses. It's paid anything. My father constantly pesters me to tell him where he can get free movies, music, software and so on. He wanted to know where he could make unlimited online backups for free and I told him that stuff costs money. Somehow people have gotten it in their heads that if it's on the internet it's free and they shouldn't have to pay for anything.
After I started my job and the prices came down with the help of online music sales and streaming, I bought a lot of CDs and digitally distributed music. Most of them were albums that I already have, because I wanted to support the artists which brought that feelings into my life.
Same is also valid for software, movies, or anything. If I can justify price of a software, I buy it. Otherwise, I use something FOSS instead.
The VC funding model of investing for growth has helped to create this perception. The sad consequence is that this has made it difficult to run companies that don’t scale to sizes that interest VC investments.
That is a better way of living, but it’s a harder choice for a lot of people.
With recent political trends towards the far right, it could become a harder choice for even more.
Yes, you're right. The climate worldwide is not the kindest recently. BTW, with uncomfortable I didn't mean opinions or ideas, but anything which will embrass you or put you in a hard situation if revealed.
As a corollary, this means living an honest life and telling what you think. Generally violence doesn't born from ideas themselves, but the way these ideas are told. So talking politely and without attacking the other side results in a reasonable discourse in most cases. Disagreement is in the nature of communication, and if can be managed well, it's very beneficial to both parties.
I can run it on a $10 droplet from Digital Ocean. $10 is kinda high just for my email, but the bonus is I host _all_ my family's mail. Wife, kids even mom and dad!
It's been nice not being concerned about email privacy. Zimbra is a great piece of software. I think more people should look into it.
99.99+ uptime for mail is generally not as important, as undelivered emails get resend if it wasn't up at the time of delivery.
it might still be a problem, because its technically possible to disable that feature, but its generally done everywhere.
the bigger problem is, iirc, that the biggest mail provider (gmail) pushes unknown mail servers to spam... so you'll probably be forced to use a relay.
thats still not a big problem, because you generally get one from you domain registrar
there are also fully functional mail implementations that you can use right away with minimal configuration such as MailInABox [0]
...still, i've switched to fastmail ~2 yrs ago and won't be going back to self hosted anytime soon, though i do own several servers i could use for that...
It Rarely ever goes down (maybe twice in 4 years? I have to think really hard to remember an outage, it's just kinda always....there.)
I periodically run:
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
Most of us speak out against against Google because we like most of Google and want to continue to use their services, just not to thrilled about some things and want them to shape up, not have them cease to exist completely. It's the difference between being reasoned or extreme.
I'm not that bothered about the type of privacy Chrome invades. If someone put a camera in my bedroom I'm bothered but if Google knows I'm thinking of fixing my washing machine and tries to advertise to me it doesn't bother me.
But say that and you get down voted etc by the "people screaming their lungs out about privacy" crowd. So us types kind of keep quiet.
From my experience this is the ways most of the people I know came in contact with Chrome. Even those where I've installed FF end up with Chrome. When I ask them why they switched, they don't know. They don't even know where it came from...this is what you get from clicking "Next" without reading...
It is not a big issue really as FFF (as I understand it) is not meant to be used for tabbing a lot and it prevents the usual tab accumulation.
I think they switched to Gecko lately, but not sure if is still as fast.
(Reading this thread and writing this comment from Firefox on my phone)
I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago but I had a terrible experience using Hangouts with a customer for two hours. The Firefox degraded until a point of no return and that sucks when you are talking with a customer. I initially blamed the network but there was no signal of network issues.
So, you're saying Google's anti-competitive tactic of degrading and not supporting other browsers worked on you. Did you know there's a name for that tactic? Embrace Extend Extinguish.
Did you consider using another, more neutral video conference system?
I use FF for normal browsing and Chrome for Google based stuff that requires an account, like Gmail, YouTube, Docs, etc. Besides not having ANY performance issues with FF I think it is good practice to separate most of your accounts from normal surfing.
In Chrome: no problem at all.
We pay for G Suite so I don't expect to pay for another service. I love Zoom btw.
I'm not sure which is likely to be lower ranked at Google - Edge compatibility for all those end users for whom changing browsers is too difficult or Firefox where compatibility is probably easy but the users can probably figure out the message of "works better with OEM branded components (or browsers)!"
i.e. git.example.com has the IPv6 and sometimes sentry.example.com resolves the ipv6 of git besides not having any IPv6 AAAA entry at all. I could not find out why that is happing, since it's only happening in FF.
besides that, I also think the developer tools got better, but are still not on par with Google Chrome. (At the moment I primarly use Firefox, besides when the bug occurs than I open these services in Safari or Chrome)
For me it's pinch zooming. I've been waiting for it for ages. It's the last issue keeping me from leaving Chrome.
Just tried newest Firefox on macOS and Windows 10, and sadly it still didn't work on either.
This feature is great for hiding flashing sidebars and distracting navigation bars. And of course zooming in occasionally, when the need arises.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=Google%20...
Sometimes, after 2 days of work each worker consumes ~7Gb of RAM (on machine with 16GB of RAM)...
P.S. mostly opened documents in google doc, gmail, calendar, JIRA/Confluence...
[1] I think this was the bug I thought about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042, see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
I am loving Quantum, and I don't understand why Firefox continues to slide.
With this Edge announcement (a new Microsoft Chromium browser), I'm nervous we're getting into not a duopoly, but potentially a monopoly.
Apparently a lot of Firefox installs are on older systems (think Windows XP/Vista era) from before Chrome took over the world. There's a reason Firefox was the last major browser to drop XP support (they only did so when 52 ESR left support a few months ago!). As those systems get phased out they generally get replaced with systems that come with Chrome preinstalled and that's "good enough" for most people buying them (unlike Internet Explorer back in the day) so they don't seek out alternatives.
They broke extension support. Half of the extensions disappeared (didn't migrate to Quantum). The other half works only partially. One year after Quantum i still have a blank new tab because a custom html file in new tab would require an extension AND a web server.
Sure, it is harder now for non-technical users to shoot themselves in the foot. On the other hand, Mozilla took away control from users. After Quantum I lost all hope.
Given their small "market share", it would seem right to remove a major burden to rapid development (the old extension format, XPI) in favor of open standards (web workers).
It's more maintainable, more in-line with current standards. I am only speaking as a fly-on-the-wall here. Although I am a senior "full stack" developer, I am pretty far removed from any of the day-to-day here.
By wiping the slate clean in terms of extensions, hopefully this will be a small paint-point, quickly forgotten, and things move forward from here.
Re-reading this prior to submit, it seems like I've inserted too many items straight out of the BS generator but I'm ok with it.
Perhaps. But it sure would have been better if the new extension system were as capable as the old before axing the extensions. The loss in functionality, for me, is unacceptable. At the heart of it, this is what made me give up entirely on post-57 Firefox.
Was this intentional, or simply a consequence the architecture of quantum?
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
"3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter In the first table on the page, click the "Show Folder" button.
In your profile folder, scroll down and double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. You may see numerous files here. Of particular importance:
recovery.js: the windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session -- if you check the modified date/time, is this fresh or is it from the time frame that keeps coming back? recovery.bak: a backup copy of recovery.js previous.js: the windows and tabs in your last Firefox session upgrade.js-build_id: the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update Do you see any numbered files, such as recovery-1.js? Firefox may create those when it is unable to store your current session history in recovery.js. Unfortunately, at the next startup, those files are not used automatically.
Note: By default, Windows hides the .js extension. To ensure that you are looking at the files I mentioned, you may want to turn off that feature. This article has the steps: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-na...
E: too many e's
I use Firefox (Nightly) on a 2015 MBP and I do think it feels less snappy than Chrome.
If it didn't have Container tabs, I might switch back to Chrome, despite very much wanting Firefox to succeed. Performance is key.
Rendering a page is expensive enough, but you have a generation of programmers who only know javascript (and for good reason, the web is an incredible software deployment system). But when everything is a web-app, then the renderer that does the parsing and execution needs to be optimised so hard that the code might as well be proprietary.
That's how I feel about chrome. Parsing and rendering websites today is /hard/ and we're not helping things by pushing more and more and more into our browsers. Of course it will become a monopoly.
On your machine perhaps. Not on mine. Just trying to be more precise here.
I’ve been a very happy Firefox user since Phoenix days.
Chrome I can at least disable CORS via the command line, and Safari does it best by putting it in a Developer menu that I can easily toggle.
Firefox's dev tools also seem to still be behind — I haven't seen a good way to inspect WebSocket frames, for instance.
I would really prefer to use Firefox due to Mozzila's stances on privacy, especially in contrast to Google; however, I have to use the tool that lets me actually get work done.
I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)
In practice, it's not a problem for me, because the presence or absence of my usual row of extension icons and profile photo is enough of a clue.
But I could see where someone who doesn't normally sign into Chrome, or who doesn't have very many extensions in their normal Chrome profile, could have trouble distinguishing it from their a profile. The windows will tend to look pretty similar.
The problem I see is that not everyone takes the same precautions. And plenty of developers accumulate these sort of tweaks and hacks in their daily driver without realizing or remembering that they've crippled their own security posture.
From a UX perspective, my preference is to make it clear when normal security mechanisms are disabled.
If you're not a lone wolf, or working in the SV bubble, the IT and security departments are going to tell you to go pound sand.
CORS is allowed while running locally and then set while running in development and finally production.
I don't buy your comment at all.
I agree with you that fixing the headers (via a proxy in this case) is the right solution. I'm just not able to prioritize right now.
Beyond that, there are always going to be occasions where developers, security analysts, and testers need to bypass default security enforcement. I'd like to see every browser provide a way to make these adjustments for a one-off session (e.g., via a command-line switch). It's an efficient solution that I can offer when I come across a nasty hack living permanently in a developer's web configuration.
The cleanest solution is to extend the dev pipeline with a proxy for localstack. It won't take me long to knock that out, but it's not something I can prioritize at the moment.
This is what we do while running docker for local development with node.
Then you can change the theme for that profile which makes it obvious which instance you're using.
Is it for 3rd party domains and APIs or response that you control? Either way, controlling it in browser doesn't sound like the right way.
I have localhost.com in my hosts file and a local web server to run around it, but it's still really frustrating not being able to turn it off entirely.
If yes, you can setup different environments (dev, staging, production) and set CORS accordingly for each of them.
If no, how is it working in production?
I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store.
It's an edge case, and in the past when I've done web development simply turning off CORS on staging has trivially solved any issues. But it does feel a bit like the developers of the browsers have chosen not to include the feature in a "we're smarter than you, trust us, you don't want this" kind of way. For the most part, they're probably right.
Just a wild idea that I haven't tried yet:
Would it work if you configure your etc/hosts to point production domain to localhost and open the production domain in the browser?
I'm gonna try this when I get free time.
I have found a few session manager options on Firefox but most suffer from permission bloat and poor UI.
Last I checked, there was nothing to make it easier to manage add-ons.
Agreed with the missing WebSocket inspection.
Why support what already broke your work once without an actual transition plan? They didn't have a full replacement ready to go when they got rid of XUL, and seemed that they didn't really care.
Why would a web developer support one browser over others? They keep everyone honest by sticking to the middle road and not having a badge like "Works Best In FireFox".
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
At the end of August of 2018 they stopped supporting 52 ESR which is the last extended support release that supports the old addons.
During the 3 years between a and b mozilla worked to provide support for flexible interesting addons which is why all the notable interesting addons I'm aware of have new versions.
I'm sure that the will to port every useful addon in existence just isn't there but it seems challenging for firefox to move forward without ditching the old addons.
Did you realize the new addon system was released over 3 years ago? It kind of seems as if perhaps as a user you were only peripherally aware of matters and derived an erroneous interpretation of events.
The websocket inspector was a feature request filed 6 years ago. [1]
Maybe Firefox devs didn't have time for it. But somehow they got all the time in the world to add clickbait Pocket articles on my new tab page.
They obviously see that this relationship is extremely risky, especially as Firefox becomes less popular and thus their userbase less valuable to Google. As such, they're trying to diversify their revenue stream.
Do you have any better solutions? Browsers are absurdly expensive to develop, by the way.
But the market is not a meritocracy, as much as some people like to pretend it is. Success in the market is much more to do with things like marketing, momentum, inertia, and general opinions. All of these things are favoring Chrome right now, and Mozilla is not in a position to turn this around.
And you may not have noticed, but being popular doesn't actually give you money when your product is free and features no ads or tracking. All you are saying is that "google should give mozilla more money". How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
1. Hardware acceleration is still disabled by default on Linux
2. Pocket
3. Unwanted notifications about wanting to update / being updated / having updated
3. Ugly spacing left and right of the adress bar
4. Takes longer to start
5. No integration with GNOME keychain.
6. Ctrl+Q quits the browser.
7. Laggy UI
> How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I would suggest that they don't need to diversify their revenue stream. As long as they are a major player, Google (or any other search engine) will continue to fund them.
Those spacers are easily removed via customize mode.
I still have open bugs in Firefox from 2012. Firefox is riddled with layout and scripting bugs. I don't understand how they can afford all of this experimental development and "outreach" stuff, when the core product is basically just accumulating bugs which they will never address. Their tracker is full of untriaged bugs from as far back as a decade.
A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.
I'm not sure what Mozilla's deal is these days, to be honest, but Firefox really just doesn't feel like it fits in on Mac. It's frustrating, because I want to support it... but I just end up back in Safari because it feels far more smooth and integrated.
How is Google Chrome more AppleOS then Firefox? Granted I can't stand AppleOS and find the UI to be totally frustrating still in 2018 and how old it feels. How is Firefox any different then Google Chrome?
Keychain does not work, FF57 killed KSE.
On Linux with KDE that web-extension change killed the kwallet integration too. But you are right when you are saying that it degrades the user experience of MacOS users :-(
I'm a Firefox user on macOS and I don't remember issues with scrolling. I don't use a trackpad, maybe that's the issue?
Things that bug me - For some reason often when I have quite a few tabs, open link in new tab stops working, the tab appears then disappears instantly, oddly if I use Vimium to open the tab in a new link it works. Mostly I use Vimium so this is not too much of a problem
- Copy pasting of formatted html is worse than Chrome.
- Confluence runs like a pig on Firefox for some reason, completely unusable on some pages, not strictly a FF problem, but is problematic.
- Just something about the aesthetics that is somehow "off"
On the positive
- I like the developer tools
- "Column select" out of the box just works
- scrolling tab bar instead of teeny tiny tabs where you can't see anything is good
- I feel better that I'm hopefully leaking less data, not that I can really verify that, but I generally believe I should be better protected than if I was using chrome
Overall, while there is cool things about FF, I feel I'm using it not because its the better browser, but some vauge idea I'm helping browser diversity.
https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/firefox-containers-are...
Firefox has always been a resource hog and crash prone for me on just about any system. Although I use it primarily for some of its features and prefer it over chrome.
Even if the money is simply spent on marketing, I think that could be a good thing.
I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.
Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.
Then I tried it in Chrome and found that Gmail behaves like shit in Chrome too.
The solution however was to drop Gmail's web interface. Switched to a desktop client. If you're on MacOS I think MailMate is the best.
Couldn't be happier. And this advice is independent of your browser choice.
PS: the fact that Google's online properties are optimized for Chrome should make you realize that Chrome is the new IExplorer and it's our fault for allowing it to happen ;-)
I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
I find it intriguing that each incognito window in Chrome is not sandboxed between each other. Am I missing anything here?
Both their plugin ecosystems are significantly less robust as well e.g if you want to use any popular tools e.g shodan, google data saver, edit this cookie, etc
I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.
I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is something I’m not really happy about.
Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've been doing it forever.
Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.
Firefox actually has 2 domain specific search-shortcut features, but both take time to set up and then is not intuitive at all. Chrome just blows it out of the water.
Also wtf - if I type "hello" and press enter in the search bar in FF, it puts a "www." in front and ".com" at the end.. like holy hell, if I knew the domain I'll write .com myself, it really is no problem. I even went ahead and googled for 15 minutes and disabled this in some deep settings somewhere, but it still does it when I press enter too fast... damnit, it frustrates me every single day.
I hope they see this and fix this very-frustratingly-obvious anti-UX behaviour..
it's really jarring to be sent to a random domain when looking up something in a hurry.
Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways.
As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automatically adds these search actions, and perhaps a bit of the UI polish too (like how Chrome's omnibox will recognize you're performing a keyword search and adapt accordingly). It doesn't make much of a difference for existing power users, but it could help new users discover and use the feature.
It works flawlessly in all browsers I use.
Typing "w! foo" beats "wikipedia foo" every time.
It's still not as smooth and doesn't support as many OpenSearch providers as Chrome's, but might already help a bit.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
> I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.
Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
I wouldn't expect this at all!
I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._
I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.
The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites.
Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.
Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.
These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.
Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
And, yeah, if Mozzila likes dropping numbers, nothing has to change.
Just this last month I've had Firefox crash tabs daily that Chrome handled perfectly fine, I've seen it crash the entire browser when Chrome did just fine. Underlying both those issues was a janky Windows install that was partially broken. But still, Chrome carried on like a trooper.
I've even just switched back to Linux and immediately saw Firefox stumble over scrolling frame rates. That was caused by using an Nvidia graphics card and the proprietary drivers on Kubuntu which was a bit janky again to say the least. But Chrome carried on through again with no problem.
Just today I've switch to an AMD graphics card and the opensource drivers on Fedora and only now is Firefox seemingly playing nice.
It's a great browser (though Dev Tools don't seem as good to me) and I love the containers but it does seem it needs a bit more of a particular environment to operate just right whereas Chrome 'just works' more of the time. That is possibly why lots of people say 'fine for me' (it is for me now, yey!) but others say "it's broken" or 'slow' or whatever.
( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. )
So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. The funny thing is that similar webs don't have this issue, and I don't notice any slowdowns that push me to do side-by-side tests.
Chrome feels like an untamed animal which does stuff without telling you, and I don't like it.
To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.
More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.
I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.
They simply changed the default bookmark location with no option to change it back.
I need an addon to change the default bookmark location to keep my earlier filing approach.
I mean really?
I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.
I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.
I ditch all Alphabet services, I do not like to waste my system and network resources for it's sake.
There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.
Firefox was always good on other OS. And you got noscript there with full access to block everything Chrome does not want you to block.
About noscript:
Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.
If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.
The last part is true, it did suck for a while. But I can't say "no fault but their own". Even if they rocked, they would have taken a big hit: chrome was advertised for a long time, and at no cost, using solicitating prompts directly on the most consultated and trusted web page in the world.
Haven't really paid attention to resource usage vs chrome. I don't immediately feel like it's incredibly lower, if lower at all, but that's just taking a cursory glance that having a decent amount of static tabs and a video player running (not 1080p) is using 2gb of ram. I feel like chrome would be right there, maybe higher, like 3gb.
edit: Also, I found this which turns the entire thing into a dark mode (I use Dark reader as well) https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox
It's got some quirks that bug me. On Windows (I use OSX mostly) it seems to have issues with dragging links out but nothing to get me running away from it.
But otherwise it's great.
It should be noted there have been side projects to back nodejs with spidermonkey [0] and have electron APIs backed with gecko [1].
I agree with you and the thing I want more than anything is a cross platform browser engine embeddable with a supported C API that's not Chromium. Servo was on its way, but work has definitely slowed. But I acknowledge that even though I would build my own browser UI on top of an embeddable gecko engine, it probably won't affect adoption that much to be worth the effort.
0 - https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode 1 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron
It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.
ps: a x201 core i5 520m
The thing is that rewriting a browser engine doesn't just happen over night. No bigger browser engine has been written from scratch since the previous millennium. Also, no browser engine implements all currently specified webstandards. So, Mozilla would have to full-pelt develop Gecko to be able to keep up with Blink in webstandards, and then also develop Servo at more than full-pelt to be able to catch up in finite time.
That just doesn't add up, which is why Servo was specifically started as a research project. It might never be completed. They have been able to integrate various components from Servo directly into Gecko, therefore sharing the development work which they didn't really plan with, so that's one tiny reason to still hope for it to ever catch up, but yeah, just don't be too optimistic.
Having said all that, the integration of components from Servo into Gecko isn't done yet. WebRender is still missing, which should bring another good performance boost. It's sort of been overhyped with artificially complicated CSS animations [0], so the real world effect isn't that big, but it's still very much noticeable.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws
Aside from that, on Android, Mozilla is building a new framework for building Android browsers in general, called "android-components", which also includes a much cleaner integration of Gecko on Android, called "GeckoView". They've already rebased Firefox Focus onto GeckoView and are actively working on rebasing Firefox for Android (Fennec) onto it, too, which is internally called "Fenix". This should also significantly reduce the lagginess and speed up their development in the long-run.
I guess, what I'm mainly trying to say is that there's definitely still things happening.
Chrome is the new IE though. Making whatever specs they need for Google Sites - standards be damned.
The web actually works great without JS, and doesn’t require gigs of memory to browse.
Every month there’s some new JS API being proposed or developed for browsers, with no care for its impact on the web. The JS APIs are still growing and only getting more complicated too! service workers is a perfect example of the problem. Offline browsing worked great 20 fucking years ago, but now multithreaded Turing complete programming languages have to be used to view a website offline. It’s absolutely absurd.
As you said, they could also make a killer electron alternative and it would be very fitted to Servo as you can start with a subset of the spec and focus on performance/footprint, but their lastest attempt is from what I know this : https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell/blob/master/README.... which is almost 1 year old
They compete for the same money, no?
The next thing seems to be Fission, which is the continuation of the e10s (electrolysis) content process model into full/more Site Isolation. ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission - but it seems hard as fuck: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-July/006... nowadays they seem to be stripping out the old Gecko XUL stuff and replacing it with something newer and better: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-November... )
Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.
Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window.
Is there a way to fix that?
Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
Also: Some parts of NYTimes, and Slack.
There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
But the way the subscription mechanism is implemented with a pop up is annoying and archaic.
There must be a better way to let users know that notifications are enabled than sticking a pop-up in their face.
I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry.
Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups:
https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups...
I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own.
It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties.
On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up.
As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
You don't really need two bookmarks for that. Wikipedia will redirect to the article if the search string happens to be exactly the same.
For people's information, these can be turned off in Safari preferences -> Search.
And some people are okay with storing their history somewhere in the cloud.
I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.
Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.
Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.
This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.
But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.
I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.
I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it?
At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong?
It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA.
I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.
Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.
These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.
The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).
this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet
Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users.
Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.
We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome.
Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands of people.
Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology
Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.
1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?
2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.
For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.
It's kinda strange how bad mozilla is in doing the obvious good. Building in a direct support for chrome-store should be a priority. Solutions like this addon have such a bad experience..
This is my experience too, unfortunately. I keep using Firefox instead of Chrome now to support Mozilla and their positive attitude towards end-user privacy, but compared to when I use Chrome it is an annoying product to use with the endless waiting and lag. Using Linux, so maybe it is just really only optimised for Windows PCs (arguably their largest user base)?
The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.
I just wish it was better, because while it does get annoying at times, I do want to support Mozilla :-/
Note that this is why Firefox underwent the extensionpocalypse last year; the prior extensions model made it impossible not to regularly break the ecosystem. The next bit about "why code for browser X?" is also why they based their new APIs on Chrome's, to make it easy for existing Chrome extensions to support both browsers.
Modernly Firefox can't be customized much more than chrome - extreme hacks are needed: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)
However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads (videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)
You say this, but on mobile, the only major browser that supports extensions is Firefox. Not Chrome. Not Safari.
> And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately
I disagree. Why do you think it is "pretty bad"?
Sync is the worst by a mile. You can NEVER expect a tab you opened (or history) on computer to show up reliably on mobile device in timely fashion.
That said, I keep going back to Firefox as my preferred phone browser, I still like it more than the others. And Firefox is definitely my favorite desktop browser, ever since Quantum. It was an enormous speed improvement over Safari on Mac for me when it came out, and I'm enjoying Firefox on my new PC laptop too.
Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure).
That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.
Wipr is the one I use, and I basically never see ads anymore on iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027?mt=8
using Firefox on desktop though, can't complain much over there, but it's useless on android if it crash even on ordinary sites
I still use and support Firefox for development purposes, and am wedded to containers, but apart from that it's Brave all the way (especially on mobile, which has been my default browser for over a year now).
[1] Excluding anything that bakes in Google spyware, and I believe they'll do a bit more curating of extensions from a security perspective.
That also means I can financially support sites without handing over any PII data as well.
It's up to them to offer a deal to get subscriber data (marketers gonna market), but the bar is increasingly high as we see hacks like Quora.
I think we're moving to a world where publishers will see that an MVP business model is 'dollars without data', and BAT with ZKP anonymity enables that.
I'd say Firefox's support for extensions is better than Chrome's, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript, for example, thinks Firefox has the best environment for add-ons:
https://hackademix.net/2017/11/21/noscript-1011-quantum-powe...
With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.
My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!
Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.
[1] - https://adnauseam.io
[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:
""" Disable Developer Mode Extensions
Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe """
I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!
uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.
Some extensions dont work after a year of being undeveloped, because the API changes. Is this really a bad thing? Opensource software uses patching as a "heartbeat" to discern whether a project is still developed or not. Hackers find holes over time, and when devs no longer fill them, the project needs to be left for dead.
Why should browser addons be any different?
I guess its a different philosophy - if the devs leave a browser addon for dead, the users should too.
Once every couple of years, the API changes and cleans out dead addons. Im not sure this is often enough.
But the best addons stay. NoScript. Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin. httpsEverywhere. The best Canvas blockers. These stay up to date.
What is missing?
For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Whenever I'm roped into fixing some family member's computer, I always install all of those except privacy badger.
Firefox has actually been more responsive and less jittery for me than Chrome for quite some time, but I've seen various differing experiences in large enough numbers that I suspect this is dependent on many variables. Yet any difference I observe is still minimal. Can it really be that bad?
These days if a service doesn't support email auth I just don't bother signing up for it. I control my email address and the domain used for it, I can't see a reason to use my old gmail anymore.
The only answer to all this bully behavior is since years only one: Firefox.
A bit slower here and there? It's ok, machines are getting more and more powerful. Your data won't come back, once it's in someone else's hands.
Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped build it.
Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and institutional structure that builds them.
Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to Firefox.
Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.
they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.
Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option (as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.
personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the tabbar any more.
And good point about Tree Tabs. I've been wanting to try it for a while, might as well do it now :)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
Personally, I'm chasing VR and AR to be the new wave of the Web, where browsing experience will be heavily differentiated.
IE wasn't a first-mover, it was bundled with the computer, it won as the most available, just like Starbucks vs. Coffee Bean - later comers can be assumed as more readily available then their perceived equivalencies. Firefox broke through by shattering the consumer's perception of equivalence.
The door for differentiation in the same way as before has closed, but not for differentiation in other ways that people immediately perceive.
Lacking a prescriptive direction that Mozilla Inc should take to establish this doesn't invalidate the observation, you can describe an illness without knowing the cure.
When this becomes necessary you know you've lost your power user audience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589555
Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.
The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers.
More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.
Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.
I've been using Firefox continuously since version 3.1 and it's been bothering me a lot recently. Circa 2011 Firefox was perceived as a memory hog, and MemShrink effort was started to keep it under control, which resulted in the nifty areweslimyet.com website (which was transparent and good PR too).
Now MemShrink seems defunct, areweslimyet is obsoleted with seemingly all the progress undone as of last update in 2017, and the new Perfherder website is inscrutable for an outsider.
In my case, Firefox balloons to gigabytes of RAM with just a few tabs open. If you need more than 8GB of RAM on your system to do basic office work something has gone rather wrong (and RAM prices are historically somewhat high right now).
I agree that it's annoying and user hostile, but "extremely difficult"? It's one button in settings.
I'm afraid there are only some options:
1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible. 2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps. 3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share.
Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(
I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes. The biggest impediment from switching from Chrome to Firefox was being familiar with the Dev Tools. One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be.
We really need to keep Firefox alive, it's our best, free-est option. With Microsoft replacing Edge with a Chrome-based browser this is as important as ever.
This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.
Beyond that I don't find much difference and there are as many times I find that the Firefox dev tools can do things that I can't in Chrome.
They should showcase containers, tree style tabs and other things that chrome can't do and are massive productivity and quality of life changes. Instead they market privacy and performance features and change their brand, which let's be frank barely interest even 9% of the people.
Any time I explain to people who see my browser about tree style tabs or containers, at least 30% switch, usually within days.
All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it).
A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."
I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys like the one in this article.
One thing I would mention, though, is that using google services will all downgrade themselves if you use firefox for android. For example, this is the exact same search in chrome: https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png and in firefox: https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png (both using the same android phone). It's even worse if you're trying to use a "near me" search. I don't want to put an image for privacy reasons but major functionality is removed, such as the ability to view the business's hours(!) Also, google maps doesn't seem to work in firefox. And when it does, it's very slow.
However, there's a really easy solution to this! Install a user-agent switcher and have firefox identify as chrome. These problems will all immediately go away.
I would recommend Firefox Focus/Klar instead.
For example: there is a way to completely hide the 'X' from the tabs. I love that. It's weird for some people but I like it that way. Chrome cannot do that. There is a feature request, but it was marked as won't fix for a long time now. Who decided that, I don't know and I don't care.
I want my options like that and many others that Firefox has and Chrome hasn't. And with the danger of being misunderstood here, I would consider switching, if Chrome had a few features/options I want. But the fact that Mozilla people care and spent 10 min to add the option for me or an add-on, makes them stand much higher in my mind.
An example is that Firefox has a good tracking protection system.
The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone". Great when you're looking at a recipe / restaurant address / funny picture on your computer and want to have it on your phone.
You can do the same in Safari with AirDrop and Handoff.
If you enable iCloud for Safari, you can see all your Safari tabs from other devices.
If I notice something cool whilst at work I can send to my Home desktop, and vice versa. when at home and see something that would be useful at work send it there.
Awesome feature.
Also, how the heck is Internet Explorer more popular than Firefox? Even Microsoft doesn't want people using it.
Yes, dev tools features could be expanded as well as the plugin franework(vimperator!).But these are non-issues for regular users.
For example, I was unable to use NoScript, because it didn't really work well.
Still, this is something you can forgive considering that for more than 15 years they released always good software.
It was a slap in the face of the core user base and they did it carelessly. They did not have the necessary information in place early enough and did not fix bugs that prevented people from porting their addons before the end of the last pre quantum ESR. They more then deserve where they are today
Man, a web browser that works on all the current existing devices on the planet is not something that I would consider trivial, at all.
Internet Explorer needed a brand new operating system that forces it for anything you do to regain some momentum...
Apple has to offer obviously stuff that you can't do easily with other browsers, like integration with the password manager, etc...
Google Chrome... We will see what happens in 10 years. They are making more and evident what they developed that browser for.
XUL extensions removed, power users are angry and leaving. And the power users were the main driving force for Firefox adoption - mostly not by themselves, but as influencers for people around them.
What an irony indeed.
I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to claw back some control from Google.
You mean, it's the only usable browser for users like you. I assure you, most users don't use this and don't really care for it.
Before chrome, FF outcompeted IE & safari on features. FF's features against OS makers moats like making their browser default and unlimited finances.
Once mobile got added to the mix, default, preinstalled browsers had even more advantage.
The feature/quality gap just isn't enough anymore. When FF gained all that market share 10-15 yrs ago, it had tabs years before the competition. It had add-ons before the competition. You could have IE6 or you could have FF with firebug, "tabbed browsing," as blocking, and cool web 2.0 stuff like social bookmarks and whatnot.
It was a massive feature gap. That's no longer the case. Hard times.
Although it is possible to move the tab bar using user CSS [1].
You're also missing out on a much faster browsing experience with the newer versions. In the older version I remember the scrolling lagged when I opened a new tab in the background, that hasn't happened in a while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
[1] https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#movet...
Usernumbers went something like 250->300->275 Million. Seems they are somewhat stable in numbers.
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
#TabsToolbar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
}
(My wife has never used anything but FF, but she begrudgingly updated, and is now a happy user. I switched from Chrome; I can get way more tabs open on my cheap Asus 2-in-1 with FF.)
You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap will thank you.
Anyway, brace yourself: an era of "proprietary web" is coming, with a worst lock-in than Windows era in the '90s.
https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
If you select all the browsers, you can see Firefox numbers are even more dire. going from 10% to 5% in the last 5 years.
Remember how crucially important it is that we have more than one web browser.
Market dominance has almost nothing to do with technical merits.
Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's correlation or causation.
There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is definitely miles ahead of Webkit.
Chrome is faster based on the butt-dyno: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-dyno
I just commented about this somewhere else but basically no. Something here is wrong.
Firefox fans say it's fast, Marketing materials say fast, even benchmarks say it's fast
...but it just feels slower than the rest to the average joe.
There is something somewhere that isn't translating to speed somewhere. In a previous comment I've highlighted my experience with youtube and amazon as places where Firefox feels slower/clunkier compared to chrome. I really like Firefox, even love Rust but there is a problem somewhere that the firefox devs and hardcore fans just keep denying exists.
I did a big analysis of the distribution of extensions on Firefox vs Chrome.
You could expect Firefox to be maybe 1/3rd that of Chrome.
Nope... it's 1/40th.... So 40x more people use the same extension on Chrome vs Firefox.
I'm not sure why this is... it might be that Chrome users adopt extensions more readily than Firefox users?
I think there's a lesson here on long term user growth but it's somewhat complicated.
Link to our chrome extension btw.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-polar/jkfd...
Google has consistently pushed Chrome and profits from it.
If Chrome has 10,000 potential users of your add-on, Firefox has 100, and you have 98 Chrome users and 2 Firefox users, then the add-on adoption rates are 0.98% for Chrome and 2% for Firefox.
Of course that's just shifting the hard bit, which is figuring out who your potential users are.
I just installed polar.
Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox.
Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon.
I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension.
At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.
Your website mentions it nowhere.
The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.
The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.
No GitHub issues mention it.
The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox.
Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.
Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing.
I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.
At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.
Edit:
It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!
Out of curiosity, are you going to open source the chrome one?
- What is a "user"? Is it someone who downloaded it once? Is it just straight up the number of installs that ever happened? Or is it someone who actively uses the extension on a frequent basis? If you go by the numbers on the Chrome Store and on AMO, they likely have different definitions.
- Firefox recently introduced support for an extension API which is quite similar to the Chrome extension API (for the most part a superset), so lots of Chrome extensions have been ported over from Chrome just as recently and as a result will naturally not yet have as high user numbers.
- Firefox has traditionally had more powerful extensions and still continues to have a more powerful extension API. So, there's going to be extensions that are better, which only exist on Firefox, whereas similar extensions that were ported over from Chrome, therefore exist on both, will largely be ignored.
Analysing this on a non-empirical level:
- Firefox has less users.
- Chrome has somewhat less functionality built-in, which means users will have a higher need for extensions.
- With Firefox's extensions having traditionally been more powerful, the user base should still have many tinkerers.
- Firefox extensions are much more thoroughly vetted and malware is essentially a non-issue. On Chrome, it happens more often and I have seen people removing non-essential extensions for that reason.
- Chrome users are less likely to be privacy-conscious, which somewhat negates the previous point again and means they're more likely to just install an extension without thinking about it too much. On the other hand, Firefox users should be more likely to install privacy-enhancing extensions.
- Firefox for Android supports many extensions as well (though its user base is not the biggest).
For this small speed gain and unless I switch to Waterfox or some other community effort that tries somewhat hopelessly to keep alive what many users want, I have to buy more memory and stop using FireFTP and Session Manager. I just needed Firefox, not a Chrome competitor.
Remove pocket. Respect user privacy again. Maybe they’ll return.
But I completely agree with how it was initially integrated, it was a terrible decision.
Now three major milestones I'm personally waiting for (for the Linux version) are Firefox using Webrender (efficiently) with Vulkan on Wayland.
Another one that's still missing is fully functional Servo, that can run in browser.html on some mobile Linux UX like Plasma Mobile.
Firefox has always been slower than Chrome. I was resisting Chrome very hard and long yet at some point Firefox's slowness became intolerable and I was forced to go Chrome.
With the introduction of the Quantum engine Firefox has became reasonably fast again and I switched back but as soon as I've installed all the extensions I want it became extremely slow again so again I have switched back to Chrome (which runs all the extensions I want without a noticeable slow-down).
I will switch to Firefox as soon as it becomes as fast as Chrome is (and I only have 5-8-years-old built-in Intel Graphics in my laptops, not fancy GPUs so GPU-accelerated rendering won't help).
But bottom line is it holding up nicely against MS. A lot of people seem to default to installing Chrome/Firefox instead of whatever MS/Apple is pretending is the browser of choice. To the point that these are not even the default choice on their own OS and struggling to remain in second/third position.
So not that bad for Firefox. I'm back to being a full-time Firefox user since about one and a half year. Really liking the post quantum performance and also really enjoy having fine grained control over trackers, ads, and other crap. As other people point out, their mobile browsers on Android are worth using as well. Unless you like being tracked and blasted with ads of course.
Firefox can do that automatically:
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
As others have said, I also find Safari on macOS to be faster, smoother, and consuming lesser power. But it just doesn't have the extensibility of Firefox (the extensions that I depend on regularly), and no Container-like system. The only other browser I use occasionally is Brave, having boycotted Chrome permanently a little while ago (with the user profile/cookie fiasco that the team backed out of later on).
P.S.: Of course this comment was written from Firefox. And donating to Firefox (in addition to regular donations to Thunderbird).
Now it's all about making sure DRM protected video plays, making sure Facebook works, and making sure ignorant users doesn't accidentally break their config or install malware. No longer can the user determine what add-ons they can use without switching to a buggy beta build. And lets not forget the removal of all of the customization code and the add-on holocaust right before this. Most new add-ons still have only a fraction of their former functionality. And they'll never get it back because Mozilla isn't about that any more.
Mozilla has abandoned their long time users in an attempt to become Chrome. And it has, just like all the other browsers. And that's why it's losing market share. It's the same crap but without a monopoly position to promote itself like Google or Apple.
I used to install it for my family and friends that needed help in building or setting up their computers. Now I do not because Firefox has the same anti-user policies as Chrome or Safari.
Web technology in general and DOM to be specific gives us freedom. They took parts of it away with DRM and pushing it into browsers and standardizing it. I don't want to see this happen for the rest of the web that is remaining.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/15/17239548/firefox-chrome-s...
How people trust Google's Chrome (with many closed bits) is beyond me - but of course we're all free to do whatever we want to do.
Also last time I benchmarked Firefox and Chrome (on Linux) Firefox turned out to be faster at least for the sites that I frequent.
The problem is, I still have to actually force myself to actually like Firefox. Chrome IS, all-in-all, the better the browser - except that annoying privacy thing which caused me to switch in the first place...
A major source of pain are still the development tools in Firefox. They work flawlessly in Chrome, hardly work at all in Safari after their dev tools rewrite a couple of years ago, and show annoying quirks in Firefox (like the Debugger, which sometimes simply loses a source file, making it impossible to place breakpoints there) and have, in general, a slower UI than Chrome's.
There are also many cases where doing "ordinary things" while browsing will lead to firefox slowing to a crawl or using crazy amounts of resources. Chrome is a notorious memory hog and yet somehow it manages to behave better than firefox in most situations, at least for my browsing habits. I also really like chrome's search integrations, if I want to search wikipedia all I need to do is hit ctrl-t then type "wiki <tab> search string" and boom I'm there. Same thing for youtube, amazon, etc. It's a small thing, but it's the addition of all the small things which make for an overall superior experience.
For reference Mosaic was my first browser and I've always been open to switching over to whatever browser had the best experience. I was using phoenix project builds before they renamed them, I was using Chrome back when it was in beta (speed, process isolation, minimalism, better acid2/3 scores, what wasn't to like?), and I keep checking on other browsers to see if they're worth switching to. The Mozilla org is great and firefox is a solid browser but it needs to up its game if it wants to be seen as a state of the art browser.
"Why does the HTML standard say things are supposed to work one way, and it does in Firefox, but not in IE?"
I would be laughed off any forum I visited. I would still be laughed off a lot of forums until 2012 or so. With this announcement, you will still find people who think there was nothing wrong with IE and will even think "Edge is great!".
Well, like I used to tell people years ago, if Edge is so great, why is Microsoft dumping it?
What is the point in having a separate browser engine if you don't leverage any features to make it more attractive to users? You can't beat Google by just chasing it.
I wonder if my story is similar to others. From what I've seen Firefox now looks as though it has much better tools in-built and so I could consider the switch back, but I'd love some input on that.
Also, things I develop obviously have to work on Chrome, so that's another impediment to me switching over entirely, which is a shame.
Chrome somehow bypasses compositing [it is a white window on OBS screen recorder].
Firefox seems to only get fast when I disable Windows animations; otherwise gets sluggish as soon as more than 4 tabs open.
Obviously since Google started pulling that "logged in Gmail == logged in Chrome" stupid stunt, I want to move away from Chrome, but Firefox will seldom be my first choice as an alternative.
And that’s just one of its problems on macOS. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, I see people complaining about performance or lackluster support for a macOS feature, such as Keychain.
Firefox isn’t losing because people don’t care about privacy; it’s losing because it sucks so much in certain areas, many of us who want to use it just can’t bear to.
I do still pop open chrome for the devtools when I'm working on web stuff. I wish I didn't have to, but there's one thing that FF doesnt have that I need at work: goto line in the sources browser.
Lots of our files at work are several thousand lines (I know...), and its a huge missing feature to me.
I might see if I can code it up myself and submit a patch, but that's not exactly trivial.
There is a profile manager but it sucks. You have to launch it directly (can't open from a FF window) and you can only have one profile active at a time.
Compared to Chrome where I can seamlessly have my work and personal profiles active at once, allowing me to do all of my work in a segregated profile while still having access to all my personal stuff like music playing in another window.
I know these are pretty small things in the grand scheme of things but they make it feel awkward to me. Chrome isn't perfect but it feels a lot more 'at home' on macOS than Firefox does.
The [-] collapse buttons for these threads are weirdly a lot more difficult to click (specifically, register a press with your finger) than in Chrome... Anyway, I think committing to FireFox is more important so I can deal with it.
Looking at the numbers, Perhaps the non-ie/Safari/Chrome crowd is being fractured by the alternatives available but to me it certainly seems to be growing.
The ability to highlight text, right click search and have it open in a new tab in the background.
Chrome insisted on opening in the foreground and I found it really disruptive. They have extensions that change this because but they never worked well for me.
This trend could be explained by a large number of new chromium users. Or maybe Google figured out how to push Chrome better.
I just wish it went back further so you could see just how much marketshare IE6 held
Chrome feels much faster and nicer to use. Firefox would often get really slow and start freezing. The Firefox dev tools were often really slow and unresponsive. If I was working on a big React app the devtools UI would often just disappear and freeze for 10-15 seconds. I think it was known issue related to source maps. My workaround was to close the developer tools before I refreshed the page, and then reopen them. So I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.
I really missed Chromecast support. If I ever wanted to watch a video on my TV, I would have to pick up my phone and open the YouTube app, or just open Chrome and paste in the URL.
I had to open Chrome every time I had a Google Meet call. Clearbit only provides a Chrome extension and doesn't support Firefox (but that's a problem with Clearbit. They really need to add support for Firefox.)
I liked Firefox's "Multi-Account Containers". It was nice that I could sign into multiple accounts at the same time, and have all the tabs in the same window. Chrome has profiles but they can only open in a new window. (But that works fine.)
One other advantage of Firefox: It kind of lags behind Chrome in some ways, so if your website works in Firefox, it almost always works in Chrome. When I was only developing and testing in Chrome, I would occasionally get an error report from a Firefox user. That never happened while I was using Firefox. Now that I'm back on Chrome, I'll need to be more careful about cross-browser testing.
You get what you measure. So what do they measure?
Do they ask for User-Agent logs from various sites around the net? Or do they rely on third party cookies or how does it work...?
Someone please tell me why I'm wrong
Know of any browser that can do this?
I keep giving Firefox a chance but not much is changing.
Not sure if the rewrite in Rust was worth it.
That being said, Firefox has a bunch of small performance / hang issues that have nothing to do with the number of tabs but add up over time.
I mentioned in another sibling comment of mine that my 2nd gen i7 CPU was very heavily hit by all Spectre and Meltdown mitigation fixes and is noticeably slower now. Still though, Chrome works snappily and Firefox does not. :(
Many apps are not affected but Firefox definitely is. It starts hiccuping with only several tabs open while Chrome is working just fine.
The PC has 32GB of RAM so it's definitely not memory.
Sounds unimpressive where they get the stats from. Unspecified "Social bookmarking sites". Probably something I've never visited.
Now I'm thinking about switching to Brave.
People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!!
There is no other choice than Firefox if you value privacy, features and a "company" that does not trick you!
Unfortunate to see these results.
Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.
Because that's where we're headed and nobody cares.
Is it an incorrect title?
Also remove the desktop filter and watch Safari jump up to like 20% and FF down to 4.5%. Usage of the Web on mobile is huge, and it's even bleaker for FF there.
1. First installed it on my Android phone so I could use uBlock Origin. Then found 2 other amazing extensions, Cookie Autodelete (less tracking, more privacy and no newspaper paywalls) and I Don't Care About Cookies (no more annoying Agree to Cookies popups). I couldn't be happier!
2. Despite some reports about FF issues on MacOS, I went ahead and installed it. Memory usage having many open tabs dropped considerably, maybe 30% to 40% compared to Chrome. Everything works great, speedy and solid.
3. I've installed FF on my home Windows 7 media center. Strange, but that's where FF is noticeably slower than Chrome and seems to have memory swapping issues, where some tabs will be swapped out of memory and take a while to load. The machine has only 4GB RAM though and is not very performant.
4. I've discovered Pocket and I'm really liking it. Although the recommendation engine is a total waste of time, the text extraction is great.
5. I love Firefox Focus, which I use sporadically, and I wish that was the default engine everywhere. I'm not sure if the next generation FF will be based on Servo or Blink. Whatever it may be, I hope it's as snappy as Focus.
Some issues or quirks I had with Firefox:
- Bookmarks with search keywords. Chrome OpenSearch integration was much nicer. I had to define several bookmarks on FF to have at least the searches I use the most.
- YouTube videos in Windows feel sluggish and I had to install a Windows Media extension to be able to see them. Chrome has video support out of the box.
- PDF viewing feels less responsive, but the FF viewer interface is fine.
- Downloading UX is better on Chrome. The FF down arrow on the top bar is very hidden, I tend to forget I was downloading something.
(No.)
"... And because our computers control much of our personal information and daily activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a free society."
People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!!
The numbers are so low because people do not care about any privacy whatsoever. I hope the pay the price one day and regret it.
To name just one reason FFX sync is prate and secure by default unless all the others who use your bookmarks to sell them. You by default (you can disable it) share all you bookmarks with Google. Hell yeah hi Google I have torrent sites or whatever PRIVATE stuff bookmarked. Here have it all and store it instill I am dead. And when I find out about it and disable it you already have what I need from my initial sync. Thanks yeah you are so nice to me Google.
I know a few year(s)? ago FFX was still the most user in Germany (where people generally do care more about privacy and things like that). But when I look at the stats now it seems Google has managed to even Brainwash the Germans.
Mozilla is not even very good on the claims they have. They may be working closely with the Tor browser team but I think Firefox should essentially become something like the Tor browser. Their Addons have become a walled garden as the recent cause about that paywall prevention Addon that got kicked of the "store" showed. If I got that right people can not even install it in stable versions of FFX.
Also that "Profile" Generator showed here on HN as well shows they have several deeps flaws in the browsers that need addons for fixing like canvar tracking and stuff I did not even know about. The Tor brower does all this things by default. Why does Firefox do not even have UI to some of those settings and others even need extra addons ...
I could go on. Here I am criticizing Mozilla when I actually thing there are the best browser Vendor ever. They are an non-profit. They have done so many great things for the web and there was only as extreme short tiem where I was about to switch to Chromium because the devtools or Firebox where really really slow and clunky. I am a Forefox user from the very start and I am really disgusted how Google pushed their Browser in their searches to the point that even Linux users who have if they really want to install Chromium. They should just use FFX. But what are they doing? They install Chrome. Google has even brianwashed Linux users into thinking they need Chrome. Chrome is 99% chromium with 1% proprietary Google crap on top of it. If really baffles me how stupid people are.
I lost could on how many Linux tutorials and "First things to do after installing ..." I read that had Chrome in there. Just yesterday I read a top answer on AskUbuntu about how to enabled unattended installs for PPAs and Chrome was yet again there in the example. Chromimum is right there in the sources you Idiots. Why would you infest your almost entirely open source OS with this Google crap?
Firefox is a good browser and Quantum made is faster and less resource hungry. Mozilla works on this new Browser engine with Samsung that speeds things up by a lot. Many parts are already in FFX today but I think the main parallel GPU rendering stuff is not yet. Not up to speed with that. Anyway Chrome may be "faster" in benchmarks or "feel faster" but believe me this few milliseconds are really really not worth it.
Mozilla also (until now) allows Adnauseam that clicks every ads it finds, based on uBlock origin. Chrome forbids this Addon lol but you inlike in FFX just can sideload it. I love that concept and its the Adblocker I use. It may help them with tracking me but I just love the fact that I might cause them pay per click losses.
Mozilla is not as good and as anti advertising as I would like them to. I mean Google payed 40% of their income at a time how independent can they be? They redirect search tos the this evil data snake for money to this day. I heared their CEO talk about how she likes some ads but she does not like the tracking lol. So she wants ads that do not relate to her so why not just no ads at all?
Oh the other hand where would they be without Google money? I am wondering if they would be able to make it crowd funded with Wikipedia style "annoy beg to donate ads" across half the screen.
Ok </rant>
On a MacBook Pro it is not only faster but your battery life lasts noticeable longer.
Not to mention the Safari engineers' stand on privacy as compared to Google Chrome...
1. I kept running into Safari-only issues on websites. The most memorable one was on the American Express website. I couldn't switch between cards because the selection widget was broken on Safari.
2. The marketplace for Safari extensions is anemic, a problem which is only going to get worse[1] as legacy extensions are about to be totally deprecated[2]. Firefox did the same thing, but at least they moved to the WebExtension API. Safari App Extensions are very limited in what they can do.
3. Safari's developer tools were not as good as Chrome's or Firefox's.
[1]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/09/safari-12-extensions-more/